The Lion in Autumn (4 page)

“Last year, our wideouts were horrible,” Paterno said. “They were confused at times, they didn't run routes the same way twice in a row. The quarterbacks got a lot of [criticism], but most of the time, it was not their fault.”

Winning seasons and bowl appearances had been the norm for decades in State College. This prolonged slump had arrived as unexpectedly and mysteriously as the Black Death struck medieval Europe. In the disbelief and panic that ensued, scapegoats were easy to find.

A few believed Paterno's downfall was predestined the moment the Nittany Lions abandoned the East for the Big Ten. Ostensibly the move into the storied midwestern conference populated mostly by large state institutions looked like a perfect fit. Penn State, despite its location, had always been more midwestern than northeastern in its culture and outlook. But the move greatly increased the football schedule's degree of difficulty on a week-to-week basis. And, maybe more significantly, it invited schools like Michigan and Ohio State into places where Paterno had enjoyed nearly exclusive recruiting rights. Penn State games against Big Ten opponents were broadcast throughout the region and high school stars from Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Maryland had begun signing more frequently at Iowa, Ohio State, and especially Michigan.

More spiritually inclined Penn State supporters, however, were convinced the decline began just after the university decided to add a new level onto Beaver Stadium's south grandstands. Those new seats, they believed, angered the football gods by forever obscuring the fans' view of Mount Nittany, the sacred symbol of Penn State.

Others pointed to the Minnesota game on November 6, 1999. On that Homecoming Saturday, LaVar Arrington–led Penn State was 9–0 and No. 2 in the national polls. Trailing, 23–21, with 1:22 left, and facing a fourth-and-16 situation at the Lions' 40, Minnesota quarterback Billy Cockerham heaved a Hail Mary pass downfield. The ball bounced off a Gopher's wide receiver and a Penn State defensive back but was caught by a diving Arland Bruce, a senior who had fourteen previous career receptions. As time expired, Minnesota kicker Dan Nystrom
made a game-winning 32-yard field goal. Its national-championship hopes dashed, Penn State lost its remaining three games that season and twenty-six of its next forty-eight through 2003.

But perhaps the most logical theory was the most mundane. After the ‘99 season, longtime defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky had retired. If nothing else, the loss of a man who had been at Paterno's side for thirty-one seasons prompted a major shift in staff responsibilities.

Paterno responded to Sandusky's departure somewhat oddly, eliminating the coordinator titles. He named defensive backs coach Tom Bradley the “coach in charge of defense.” He gave Ganter the same distinction with the offense, in addition to an “assistant head coach” designation. Also, the coach's thirty-five-year-old son, Jay Paterno, previously the tight-ends coach, took charge of the quarterbacks before the 2000 season and was handed additional play-calling responsibilities. As for his own role, Paterno reconsolidated some of the offensive duties he had grudgingly yielded.

When those moves resulted in losing seasons in 2000, 2001, and 2003, the offensive staff became the focus of discontent. Even as Paterno prepared to run his 2004 squad through spring drills, fans were griping about the offense on the local radio sports-talk station, 970-AM, and in letters to the
Centre Daily Times
and student-run
Daily Collegian
.

Jay Paterno became a lightning rod for much of that dissatisfaction. The program's critics, especially those reluctant to criticize Paterno, blamed his son for many of the difficulties—poor quarterbacking, subpar recruiting, dismal play-calling.

An online poll conducted among visitors to
PSU Playbook
, a Web site for Nittany Lions fans, posed this question: “Is Jay Paterno the biggest obstacle Penn State faces?” There were 249 votes: Eighty-five percent said yes, fifteen percent said no. The respondents' biggest fear was that Paterno was grooming his son, who had been a walk-on quarterback at Penn State and later an assistant at James Madison, Virginia, and Connecticut, as his successor.

“A lot of people have said I've been hanging around long enough so that I can turn the job over to Jay,” Paterno would say. “That's not fair to Jay and it put a lot of heat on him, I think unfairly. It's awfully
tough to have your kid follow you. A couple of guys have tried that and it hasn't worked that well. If, when the time comes, they want to consider him, that's one thing. But it's awfully tough.”

Paterno was extremely loyal to his entire staff. Being a Penn State football assistant was practically a lifetime job. Sandusky had worked with him for thirty-one years, Ganter thirty, Dick Anderson twenty-five.

“You have to look at the track record of this place,” Paterno said. “We don't go jumping around, getting rid of people, bringing people in . . . it's just not my style.”

That wasn't to say there were no internecine staff disputes. Conflicts between strong-willed men were inevitable, even in Happy Valley. Paterno's nature was to nag, prod, and interfere. As a young aide to Engle, he had precipitated many arguments himself. “At meetings,” he said of those early days, “I was a damn loudmouth.”

But while two coaches jawing at each other on the sideline during a 10–2 season might appear merely to be a difference of opinion, it was seen as a deep-rooted problem after losing records in three of the last four years. Fans and sportswriters had begun to note how often Penn State coaches openly disagreed. Ganter and Jay Paterno frequently appeared to be at odds on play calls. Communication—from the coaches' box, to the sideline, to the huddle—often broke down, causing on-the-field confusion and delay-of-game penalties.

“Paterno says he wants another national championship run,” wrote Neil Rudel in the
Altoona Mirror
. “Most fans would settle for getting the field-goal unit out without having to waste a time-out.”

Despite being constantly in the TV cameras' focus, Paterno himself often jumped on assistants himself during games. Afterward he would make excuses. And even though Paterno saw Robinson as one of the nation's best players, the staff couldn't seem to agree on a consistent role for him.

So Penn State supporters constantly called for another staff shakeup. And whether it was as a response to that outcry or not, Paterno eventually gave it to them.

On February 17, in a vaguely worded athletic-department news release, it was revealed that Ganter was being moved to a new administrative position, associate director for football operations. Galen Hall, 61, a onetime Penn State quarterback when Paterno was Engle's quarterbacks coach, would be brought in to take his place for the 2004 season.

In addition, Mike McQueary, another ex-Lions quarterback who recently had been a graduate assistant, would now coach the maligned wide receivers. He replaced Kenny Carter, whose departure to become Vanderbilt's running backs coach was widely seen as a bone to the program's critics. McQueary also would become the recruiting coordinator, a role previously held by Jay Paterno.

It was a lot to digest. Ganter, whose son was currently one of Penn State's backup quarterbacks, and whose wife, Karen, had died suddenly of a brain aneurysm in 2002, had long been seen as Paterno's successor. Had he been sacrificed to the team's offensive problems? Or did the move make sense? Whatever the answer, his job shift further obscured Penn State's post-Paterno future. If Ganter, the most obvious choice, wasn't going to be the Nittany Lions' next coach, who was?

At a February 18 news conference, Curley indicated that the former assistant coach would help ease his growing workload, supervising camps and clinics and acting as a marketing liaison. Ganter was close enough to the coach that he could handle a lot of his more personal responsibilities, become an intermediary between Paterno and his ex-players.

“I knew the job was good for Penn State football, but I didn't know if it was good for Frannie. Frannie was the only guy who could make that decision,” Paterno would explain. “We certainly didn't want to push him into it in any way, even though in the back of my mind I felt this was something that would be helpful to the whole program. . . . It's going to be kind of strange not being down on the sideline arguing with him every once in a while.”

In what sounded like an indictment of the old staff, Ganter said, “We agonize over game plans, down and distance and tendencies, and all of that kind of us stuff. [Hall] is a terrific game coach. . . . [He is] a guy who can see what's happening quickly and make game adjustments as the game is going on.”

Hall's hiring as offensive coordinator—though technically he was “running-backs coach/in charge of offense”—was equally intriguing. His résumé included both Penn State credentials and success as an offensive architect elsewhere. But it also contained a scandal, something squeaky-clean Penn State typically shunned.

Hall had been the offensive coordinator on a pair of national-champion Oklahoma teams in the 1970s and later was a successful head coach at Florida. He had since worked in virtually every professional league—the NFL (with the Dallas Cowboys as running-backs coach in 2002), NFL Europe, the XFL, and the Arena Football League.

In 1989, however, Hall had resigned at Florida after admitting he had violated NCAA rules by supplementing the pay of two assistant coaches by $22,000 and by arranging transportation to court for a player so that the athlete could face child-support charges.

Already, early in the spring, questions were raised about how Hall and Jay Paterno would divvy up the signal calling. Could a new, strong-willed coach with so much experience peacefully coexist with the boss's son?

“Jay will call certain plays in certain situations, and Galen will call most of the game with some input from [offensive-line coach] Dick Anderson,” Paterno said. “When we get into certain situations, Galen turns it over to Jay and vice versa.”

If that weren't unwieldy enough, the elder Paterno would be reinserting himself more forcefully into the play-calling process. And, of course, he would retain veto power over anything in the game plans Hall and his son devised.

“I don't care if God were making the calls, I would have a couple disagreements with Him,” Paterno said.

The revamped staff seemed to catch Paterno's fever. They attacked their spring duties with zest.

“It seems like we have a rookie coaching staff,” said E. Z. Smith. “They're hungry. They want to win. They're eager to teach us. Everybody has enthusiasm. Nobody is out there just going through the motions.”

That included Paterno himself, who at one point in the spring became a victim of his own renewed focus on discipline.

The large
S
in the middle of the team's locker-room carpet has traditionally been off-limits. Anyone who stepped on it had to do ten push-ups. One day in the spring, during another impassioned speech, Paterno inadvertently tread on it three times.

“Instead of having him do thirty push-ups, we made a deal and let him do thirty sit-ups. He did them in front of the whole squad,” said E. Z. Smith. “When you have a coach who is seventy-plus years old and won't take a shortcut, what kind of excuse do we have? We don't have any ground to stand on if he's not taking a shortcut.”

CENTURIES AGO,
in the broad valley now dominated by the campus of Pennsylvania State University, the Susquehannock Indians named the mountain that rolled so gently across the southern horizon Nita-Nee—barrier against the elements.

For Penn State, a rural agricultural college transformed by football and postwar demographics into a forty-two-thousand-student megaversity, Mount Nittany, which lent its name to the school's athletic teams, has remained both a practical and a symbolic great wall. Two thousand feet high, it frequently shields State College and neighboring hamlets from harsh storms. More significantly, though, it separates the uncertain world beyond from a place that those here call, without a trace of irony, Happy Valley.

The image of Happy Valley as a Brigadoon in the hilly heart of Pennsylvania was enhanced by its physical and cultural isolation. “To the kids that come to school here,” said Gary Grey, an ex–Penn State linebacker and now a visiting business professor, “this is an out-of-the-way Disneyland.” It's as if on arrival, students and professors squeezed through a crack in the natural universe, emerging into a locale as pure and pristine as it was picturesque. The problems of Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Harrisburg were too remote to matter. There was no crime or grime in Happy Valley, no corruption or cynicism.

Actually, until the middle of the nineteenth century, there was nothing much at all in Happy Valley but a few farms and a foundry. It wasn't until the tumultuous years before the Civil War, when the concept of land-grant learning institutions began to take shape, that this pastoral locale started its slow transformation into the university town where a man named Joe Paterno eventually would plant himself.

The story of Penn State began in the 1850s when America, founded by a learned elite in the cities and towns along its Atlantic coast, was developing a more democratic character as it expanded relentlessly westward. The frontiersmen and farmers populating the vast new territories were confronted constantly by vexing challenges. Soil needed to be replenished. Rivers needed to be bridged. Children needed to be educated. The private colleges of the East, which produced classically trained aristocrats fluent in Latin and Greek, offered little practical help with their daily problems.

According to Michael Bezilla, author of
Penn State: An Illustrated History
, the “elitist character [of schools like Harvard and Yale] clashed with the democratic values of the young republic.” That split generated a movement to establish schools where agriculture and the technical sciences would be emphasized.

In 1855, Pennsylvania established the Farmers High School in remote Centre County, where the Nittany and Penn valleys converged. A local farmer, James Irvin, donated the two hundred acres. His land was ideal for agricultural work and studies, since most of its trees already had been cleared to feed the nearby Centre Furnace.

Even for the sons of farmers, Centre County was an isolated setting. The school was surrounded by Allegheny Mountain peaks and forests thick with maple, beech, ash, and hemlocks, and the nearest rail station was twenty-two miles away. Many students who journeyed there faced long stagecoach trips to the school after disembarking from trains in nearby towns. (Even three quarters of a century later, the college's president, Edwin Sparks, called the location “equally inaccessible from all parts of the state.” And well into the 1990s, long-distance travelers to State College had to fly into Harrisburg and then journey ninety miles northward along a mountainous,
two-lane road.) The site's primary benefit, as far as anyone could tell initially, was that it was situated near Pennsylvania's geographical center.

In 1857, Congressman Justin Morrill of Vermont introduced legislation to create a nationwide system of rural colleges. Under his proposal, the schools would be endowed by revenue from the federal government's sale of western land. To provide settings for these institutions, states would be granted thirty thousand acres for each of their U.S. senators and congressmen.

While the measure passed initially, it eventually was vetoed by President James Buchanan. A Pennsylvania Democrat, Buchanan was beholden to the South, where the land-grant system was seen as an overextension of federal power. The measure languished in the overheated, pre–Civil War political climate until, in 1862, with the hostilities under way and the South seceded, it was passed and signed by President Lincoln.

Pennsylvania's legislature designated the Farmers High School as the state's land-grant institution. Soon renamed the Agricultural College of Pennsylvania, it grew, slowly but steadily, through the decades—eventually accepting women in 1872. In 1874 its name was changed again, to the Pennsylvania State College.

There was little time for sports in the intensely structured life of work and study in that early era of Penn State history. Devotees of certain athletic activities, such as the cricket-loving students from the Philadelphia area, played among themselves when opportunities arose. School-sponsored athletics did not yet exist, and various social clubs and extracurricular organizations arose to fill the need.

Sometime in the 1880s, a group of Penn State students formed a football club. The new sport, a rough-and-tumble hybrid of soccer and rugby, had spread west from the East Coast's private institutions, where it had first gained popularity. Penn State's club was led by a student-captain, George Linsz, because paid coaches were considered a violation of the prevailing amateur standards. On November 5, 1887, the
football club played its initial game, at Bucknell, scoring a 54–0 victory over a squad from that college in nearby Lewisburg.

A five-hundred-seat grandstand was erected in 1893 to accommodate spectators at the on-campus field where the football team practiced and played. With increased popularity came increased competition. Soon schools were eschewing some of the long-accepted guidelines of amateurism in their desire for victories. Penn State hired its first paid coach, George Hoskins, the school's director of physical training, in 1892.

Students at the college, whose enrollment in the 1894–95 school year had reached 221 (roughly the size of the village that had grown up around it), began to take notice. Football games increasingly became occasions for excitement and expressions of school spirit. In developing its football traditions, Penn State, like schools elsewhere, looked to the precedents set by Yale, Harvard, Penn, and Princeton, then the big leagues of college sports.

When Penn State's baseball team traveled to New Jersey for a game in 1906, junior H. D. “Joe” Mason was captivated by Princeton's tiger mascot. Returning to campus, Mason fired off a letter to
The Lemon
, a student publication, suggesting Penn State adopt a lion as its symbol. The choice would be appropriate, he stressed, because mountain lions had roamed the nearby hills as recently as the 1880s. Mason's suggestion caught on instantly. And since the most prominent of those mountains was Mount Nittany, its name quickly was appended to
Lions
.

Playing the kind of East-dominated schedule that would remain a fixture through the Paterno years, the Nittany Lions teams were up and down through the first few decades of the twentieth century. But then, as now, the alumni demanded victories. When Bob Higgins's team went 2–8 in 1931, with five shutout losses, the outcry was tremendous. “No boy wishes to become part of an institution which is a target of jokes and ridicule,” wrote Charles Heppenstall, a nineteenth-century Penn State player, in a letter to the
Alumni News
that year.

Even then, debates raged about the nature of the program. Across the nation, football's excesses, as detailed in the scathing 1929
Carnegie Report on American College Athletics, were widely understood though still largely unregulated. While some schools adhered to the amateur concept, others ran barely disguised professional operations. In the absence of any binding national guidelines, Penn State vacillated between the two models.

In 1900, its board of trustees had authorized scholarships for athletes who had been at the school at least a year, making Penn State one of the first colleges to do so. Later, responding to various criticisms from reformers or boosters, the number would be reduced or raised again.

Penn State football provided one of the incidents those opposed to big-time football liked to reference. In October of 1902, Andrew Smith played for the Nittany Lions in a 17–0 loss at the University of Pennsylvania. He apparently played well enough to impress his opponents, because two days later he was practicing with Pennsylvania's team in Philadelphia. He played three more games for Penn State before transferring to Penn. Smith earned all-American status at Penn in 1904, then dropped out of school.

“We go out after men for the sake of baseball and football, offering all sorts of inducements,” said W. H. Andrews, the chancellor of Allegheny College, not long after Penn State had beaten that Pennsylvania school's team, 50–0, in 1904. “It isn't a thing unknown among us for a man to go from the football team of one college to the football team of another in midseason. Scholarships are offered to promising players. Professionalism is winked at.”

Eventually, in response to the Carnegie Report, Penn State did away with all athletic scholarships, a move that pleased some alumni but angered others who saw it as an unnecessary overreaction.

In a 1935 interview with the
Daily Collegian
, former coach Hugo Bezdek observed that Penn State might be tilting too heavily toward the amateur model. “[Penn State] should cast off its Simon-pure pretensions and bring back scholarships,” Bezdek said. President Ralph Hetzel quickly rejected the suggestion.

Scholarships would be reinstated fifteen years later, in part because even then Penn State saw football as a valuable revenue-producer. In 1927, thirty million college-football fans bought $50 million worth of
tickets. In the aftermath of World War II, with the GI Bill flooding campuses with returning veterans, those numbers jumped significantly. Competing colleges began to view football as a means both to make money and to attract the new breed of everyday students.

Penn State's student population soared to 10,200 in 1946, with more than half of them returning veterans. A year later, eighty percent were vets. Temporary dormitories, labeled “Veterans Villages,” were constructed on the east end of the campus to accommodate the mad rush.

With thousands more students, and in many cases their families, on campus, attendance and interest increased for the football games at fourteen-thousand-seat Beaver Field. In 1946, the Nittany Lions attracted five-figure crowds to all their home games for the first time ever. And with postwar victories over nationally recognized teams like Navy, Pitt, and Washington State, demand stayed strong. In 1949, the trustees decided to more than double the size of the facility, expanding its seating capacity to twenty-nine thousand.

Higgins's last two Penn State teams, in 1947 and 1948, went 9–0–1 and 7–1–1. The ‘47 team, without any scholarship players, earned a No. 4 national ranking and a berth in the Cotton Bowl, where the Nittany Lions tied Doak Walker's SMU Mustangs, 13–13. When Higgins retired following the ‘48 season, he was replaced by assistant Joe Bedenk. After a strife-filled 5–4 record in 1949, Bedenk agreed to step down so long as he could remain an assistant.

The college was then undergoing another major transformation. Although it had been an exclusively agricultural school in its first two decades, Penn State's academics had remained second rate. They were, according to Bezilla, “inferior to [those] found at many private colleges and universities. . . . Too many members of the Penn State community considered their school worthy of competing on the gridiron or the gymnasium floor with the likes of Penn or Syracuse or Ohio State but inferior to those institutions by almost every academic standard.”

That perception began to change in 1950, when Milton Eisenhower, the future U.S. president's younger brother, became Penn State's president. Eisenhower had a more aggressive, wider vision than
his predecessors and set about to upgrade the college's reputation, both academically and athletically.

He believed that with successful athletics and increased funding from the state legislature, Penn State could expand its profile nationally. He had seen it work at his previous school, Kansas State, and at many of the public institutions in the Big Ten. He hired talented professors, authorized athletic scholarships, and immediately began lobbying politicians, cleverly beginning what would become a long-standing tradition of providing them with game tickets. In 1951, Penn State provided 150 athletic scholarships and 50 grants for room and board. Recipients, however, were required to meet the same academic standards as other students.

As to who would replace Bedenk, it was clear Penn State was going to follow the prompting of the student-run
Daily Collegian
, which urged administrators to find “a big-time coach for a big-time college.” The man eventually selected was a native Pennsylvanian, an ex–coal miner who longed to return to one of those charming small towns where he had cut his coaching teeth.

When he was hired to coach Penn State in the spring of 1950, Brown's Charles “Rip” Engle was forty-four years old and prematurely gray.

Despite his 28–20–6 record at the Providence school, Engle had often felt like an interloper at the elite eastern institution, with its urban campus and a student body comprised primarily of the sons of wealthy New Englanders. He had grown up dirt poor in Elk Lick, a glorified mining patch near southwest Pennsylvania's border with Maryland. He dropped out of school early and went to work in the mines, moving up from mule driver to mine supervisor by the time he was nineteen.